Installing Visual Studio

Download

Although this course doesn’t require readers to install Visual Studio, it’s suggested that learners willing to become .NET developers grab its copy from https://visualstudio.microsoft.com. The Community version is free and will be sufficient for almost all of your purposes, except commercial development.

Install

Launch the installer after the download finishes. The next window asks what workloads we want to install along with the IDE. Visual Studio is highly functional and can be used to develop applications using a variety of programming languages and frameworks. In our case, we’re only interested in C# and .NET console applications and we can get away with the defaults.

By installing Visual Studio, we install the necessary compilers and the latest version of .NET.

After installation is complete, we can start with our first program.

Run

Launch Visual Studio and click on “Create a new project.” In the next window, choose “Console Application,” then give our program a name, choose the version of .NET to use, and click on “Create.”

These steps produce a newly created project:

The large box in the middle, which is essentially a text editor, contains the generated C# code.

The “Solution Explorer” on the right displays our project’s structure. In our case, it’s the default structure of a C# project:

• The “Dependencies” node contains the dll assemblies added to the project by default. These assemblies contain the .NET library classes that C# uses. We may not need all assemblies at all times. We can remove the ones we don’t need.

• “Program.cs” contains our source code. C# code files have the .cs extension.